PCSTATS has seen in the past that nVIDIA GeForce 7600GT CPU lives up to the GeForce 6600GT's reputation of being an excellent overclocker, even on stock cooling.

With that in mind we knew we could be a bit more aggressive with the Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH and still get away with it. Starting with the core first, the Geforce 7600GT clock speed was increased in 5-10 MHz increments in nTune 5 (from a stock speed of 560 MHz).

The GV-NX76T256D-RH's GeForce 7600GT core handled this kind of rapid overclocking well and easily cracked the 600 MHz (core) mark without breaking a sweat. The passive SilentPipe II heatsink did get very warm during testing, so underscore the part about maintain good internal case airflow.

We were only able to garner a few short moments
of overclocking beyond this, as the Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH's GeForce
7600GT core maxed out 628 MHz. Anything higher cause the system to lock up - the international sign of "no, you ain't overclocking me one Hertz more!" For a passively cooled videocard I think it is safe to say the Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH did a decent job here.

Next on the agenda was the 256MB of GDDR3 videocard
memory. Starting at 1400 MHz, we were a bit more aggressive with the memory in
our overclocking and it quickly broached the 1500 MHz plateau. The Gigabyte
GV-NX76T256D-RH memory hit a maximum speed of 1612 MHz, before we gave up trying
to coax higher speeds from it. To our pleasant surprise the GeForce 7600GT
core and GDDR3 memory did not have any issues running together at their maximum
speeds. Thus, all overclocked benchmarks will be run on the GV-NX76T256D-RH with
a core speed of 628 MHz and memory speed of 1612 MHz. Team that
up with an AMD Athlon64 4000+ and a 1GB set of OCZ
Gold GX PC3500, and we have a pretty decent gaming system here.

Prelude to
Benchmarks

The details of how the
Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH test system was configured for benchmarking; the
specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions are
indicated below. In the second column are the general specs for the reference
platforms this nVidia GeForce 7600GT based videocard is to be compared against.
Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before
moving on to the individual benchmark results on the next page.